The city of Portland is really blazing trails with parking-free housing near transit corridors. As we reported before, many Portlanders have seized on the opportunity for more affordable housing and chosen to live in developments without any car parking.

Portland's transit-oriented developments allow more residents to commute without driving, but many still have cars that take up scarce space. Photo: City of Portland

Still, many Portlanders who live in transit-oriented developments own cars, and those cars can take up a lot of space. The question, says Chris Smith at Portland Transport, is how to craft policies that help people drive when they need to, without owning their own cars:

One interesting tidbit from the research that has been conducted about residents of recently built apartments: they use cars a lot less than the average citizen, at least for commute trips. Only 36% said they commute by single occupancy vehicle. That compares to 59% city-wide.

But 72% of these households are NOT car-free, which says they are owning cars for purposes other than commuting.

That’s an interesting policy problem, as car storage (parking) may impact neighborhood livability as much or more than actual car use. What kind of policies might keep car ownership more in line with (commuting) car use? ZipCar, Car2Go and GetAround, where are you?

Elsewhere on the Network today: The Greater Marin says that, contrary to what is often assumed, urban form is the result of policies, not necessarily preferences. Biking Toronto calls it a “travesty” that the Jarvis Street bike lane will be removed by city officials tomorrow. And Stop and Move comments on a Honda ad campaign that makes sleep-deprived driving seem like a normal, socially acceptable thing to do.

I envision car sharing to become an apartment amenity just as common as workout rooms or swimming pools. Or, what about offsite car storage for those who only occasionally need their vehicle?

Larry Littlefield

One issue: holidays.

We’re pretty much car free now, as our car is now upstate with our kids in college. We’ve used Zipcar or a rental car a total of four times over the past 2 1/2 months.

The car will be coming back with the kids for Thanksgiving and Christmas, so we don’t have to worry about it. But my wife and her siblings only settled on where the Thanksgivng meal would be about a week ago. When they did, I checked both Zipcar and a couple of rental car places we’ve used.

Nothing left for Thanksgiving. Not much left for Christmas.

Taking mass transit out to the suburbs or Upstate? The last time we relied on mass transit for holiday travel was in 1988, when we had travel from hell due to transit workers calling in sick and not showing up. We started renting cars, and eventually bought one. We’ve owned one for 20 years.

As we evaluate car free life, and add up the cost of our rental car and zip car trips, holiday availability will remain in our mind. Clearly Zipcar and the rental car companies cannot and will not hold enough inventory for everyone to rent on the major holidays.

http://profile.yahoo.com/BGNRXB6JCU7H5ESMJ76F64WMZM Alen

10 years ago my wife and I had a car we drove 5000 miles a year or so.

i’ve rented zipcar one time and its a rip off more than once every 6 months or so. might as well buy your own car.

Anonymous

It is extremely difficult to substitute car for non-commute trips such as family getaways to out-of-town destinations, weekend special shopping errands (of bigger items), late-night or odd occasional trips etc.

While rental cars, ZipCars and the likes do have their place, a scenario in which they are used mostly on holidays or weekends create some issues of availability (as described by @f9b2cb395abd5a101456b3b0a40912e1:disqus ).

Maybe non-ownership based car use models will evolve to take care of such situations.

voltairesmistress

I think it a great fallacy to conceptualize individuals’ use of cars as merely a practical matter. Most people prize personal mobility and will own a car to get places to which transit goes infrequently, slowly, or not at all. Cost is the only inhibitor. This is particularly for true when contemplating a quick visit to a nearby beach, a hike on the mountain, or a visit with family living in the suburbs and beyond. For example, the beach trip goes from 20 minutes (by car) to 60-90
minutes (by transit). The mountain: from 50 minutes to 3 hours.
Family: from 25 minutes to nearly 2 hours. Furthermore, the price of a Zipcar/City Car Share does not make sense if one is going to take the automobile out for more than a set of limited, targeted errands, not a short pleasure trip or an all-day visit to outlying county areas.

That said, I know some of my neighbors are perfectly happy living car-less and staying in town, seeing only those movies and visiting only those restaurants within about a 2-3 mile radius in this city (San Francisco) of slow transit and a nearly absent subway system. But many people like to roam more. It is a modern pleasure, and one that planners ignore. Maybe we think we can change people’s desires, channel their minds into a smaller geographical happy place? But that kind of psychological shift is hard to predict.

Larry Littlefield

“Contemplating a quick visit to a nearby beach, a hike on the mountain, or a visit with family living in the suburbs and beyond”…

is not as much of a problem for Zipcars/rental cars as holidays, because not everyone does it at the same time.

Now it is true that those trips seem more expensive if you don’t have your own car, but only because you are fooling yourself and not counting the fixed costs. Because you assume you “have to have” a car.

With Zipcar, that hourly or daily cost includes not only gas but also purchase, maintenance, insurance, and vehicle storage, and it hits you right in the face. But using vehicles as needed is cheaper overall, at least for occasional users in NYC. I’ve added it up, and doubt anybody owned a car for less than I have.

Anonymous

I haven’t had a car for the two years I’ve lived in SF and anytime I need one for a weekend trip I rent it and use city car share in the city for errands (fairly rare as I have some awesome bike racks). I did the math for over a year, and it was always cheaper and less stressful to rent than to own. The last year I bought a nicer bike so I could do day trips and overnights, and for reasonably in shape people, it’s very possible to do all your “getting out of the city trips” on a bike. I bike to Marin regularly for the day or overnight and if I’m tired I take the ferry back. It always beats sitting in traffic and stressing out about driving and with BART/Ferries the east bay is also a great place to explore. For me personally I love backpacking and need to get out of the city frequently, but I always hated having to drive to do it so I’ve found other ways of getting around.

While holidays are a problem for renting, I would suggest also thinking about traveling less on the holidays and/or meeting with family at different times. Obviously not for everyone, but my family is celebrating Christmas/winterfest a week early because that’s what works for everyone.

Here’s a fun site called post car travel agency that helps with thinking about car free ways of traveling to non-urban areas:

it get’s minimized in my last post so I thought it was worth posting anew:

Here’s a fun site called post car travel agency that helps with the logistics of car free ways of traveling to non-urban areas in the Bay Area:http://postcartravelagency.tum…

Anonymous

As somebody who is about to pull the trigger in going from car-lite to car-free, I agree that the issue of traveling to more remote areas which aren’t serviced by public transit (i.e., backpacking/hiking, visiting rural/deep suburban family/friends, or just “wandering” as someone else said and wanting to completed said wandering in a weekend rather than making it take a week as it might on public transit, etc.) has been the only main holdup. Even though we rarely use our car (and again, pretty much only for weekend excursions), I do feel a bit guilty about taking up street space for parking the car. However, you just have to do the math. If you are only taking weekend excursions that require a car 6 times a year, even at $80/day, it’s still cheaper to rent compared to owning when you consider insurance costs, DMV registration, parking permits, smog certification, AAA (or whatever) membership, regular oil lube/tire replacement/brake pad replacement/tune-ups, and of course the inevitable major service visits costing hundreds if not thousands every other year or so. Now, when you start taking these trips once a month (or more) and if you already own a car, then it starts getting near the break-even point.

And I think there is a valid point about rental cars not being available over holidays. However, it just requires planning ahead of time and booking one in advance. I agree that it’s a pain, but it might be less of a pain than owning a car. Everybody needs to do the math for themselves and their uses and decide which makes more sense. In the meantime, we need to keep improving public transit and walkability/bikeability of our cities so that more and more people find it more cost-beneficial to not own rather than own.

http://twitter.com/murphstahoe murphstahoe

Zimride

http://twitter.com/murphstahoe murphstahoe

Their desires may not change, but if the price goes high enough, their behavior will change. People didn’t fly out of town on a moments notice 70 years ago because it was prohibitively expensive. That may happen again, which is sad. Marshalling our resources correctly we could have kept those luxuries intact.

Anonymous

Zipcar and other car-sharing companies have strong incentive to avoid surplus supply. The practical upshot of this is that while you may be able to get a car on quick notice on Wednesday at 3pm, you can forget about any spontaneous trips on weekends or early evenings. Car-sharing requires planning out your schedule to a degree that is unacceptable to many (most?) people.

It’s also quite expensive. Studies purporting to show Zipcar is cheaper tend to assume purchase of a shiny new car, as opposed to, say, a $5000 used car you own for five years.

I don’t know the answer, except maybe to subsidize car-sharing as we now do parking.

voltairesmistress

I agree, murphstahoe. Wherever I lived in European cities and smaller towns, I always felt it was easier to access nature than most places I’ve lived in the U.S. The trains and trams and bike paths really went so many places that I never felt cooped up in an urban place . . . Will keep advocating for that better network here, so that all of us can have that kind of access without resorting to car travel.

Overtrickster

What if the city subsidized the creation of long-term parking lots on low-cost land at the periphery of the city — sites that are nonetheless served by public transit, and likely located at the end of transit trunk lines. City residents could be offered discounted or free transit passes in exchange for leaving their cars at these peripheral lots. Even if only a portion of residents took advantage, and even if many of them chose to park secondary vehicles only (like seasonal recreational vehicles), it would still reduce the demand for urban parking and could also relieve congestion. Not sure how the economics shakes out, it’s really just an idea.

Anonymous

I don’t begrudge anyone their desire or ability to go to the mountains at an hour’s notice– however, I don’t think that San Francisco (or anywhere else) should bend over backward to accommodate it at the expense of local quality of life and high housing costs, which comes from devoting large amounts of space to cars, and limiting density for the sake of preserving the availability of street parking.

If you want to drive everywhere, there are plenty of places across the US which have been designed to accommodate you.

Anonymous

Or, for that matter, to stop subsidizing parking as we now don’t subsidize car-sharing!

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